The reputation of any online company depends on the experience they offer. Special offers and marketing campaigns may drive the users to a website, but the user experience decides if the user stays, makes a purchase, and comes back at another time.

Another important aspect that can help the lower-tier companies gain ground is word-of-mouth, or customer recommendations. Deliver a great experience and your happy customers will do the promotion and marketing for you by recommending your site to others.

To protect your brand, it’s important to regularly analyze user experience while considering the fact that your users may access the website from any part of the country or world. There are multiple factors that could impact the user experience that is outside of your control such as:

DNS

Network

ISP not peering well with another ISP

Regional Firewalls

Poor Routing

Third Party Content

In the real world, users will not troubleshoot the reason why they are unable to access a website. Users won’t do a PING, DIG, or a Traceroute to check why the website is slow or inaccessible. They simply just move on to one of your competitors.

It doesn’t really matter if all your internal SLAs are healthy and green at any given moment; you must be where your users are with your eyes and ears wide open at all times.

The only practical way for any ecommerce company to do this is to simulate the real users by using a synthetic monitoring solution. Synthetic allows you to simulate the users accessing your website from as many locations as possible, and also to simulate the critical business transactions that real users perform on the website – such as the Checkout Slow, Login, Sign up, etc.

Competitive benchmarking is also critical to helping you understand where you stack up against your competitors. Stay tuned for our upcoming articles that will feature benchmarking tips and best practices, or to learn more about competitive benchmarking in the meantime, check out one of our resources.